The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel is a Richard Curtis
movie without Richard Curtis. Director John Madden (Shakespeare
in Love) and screenwriter Ol Parker have produced
something a little more down-to-earth than the truly awful Love
Actually (2003) by Mr. Curtis, but not by much. Both films
treat the initiation of extramarital sexual congress in the same
way Victorian novelists treated marriage, that is as a synecdoche
for happiness and the reward of virtue. Both, too, appear to regard
this image of human felicity, treated as an unquestioned end in
itself, the way Keats regarded his identification of truth and
beauty: that is, as “all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to
know.” In practice, of course, everyone knows that this is absurd,
just as the Victorians were not such fools as to suppose that
marriages are always happy. But in neither case does that affect
the literary usefulness of the symbolism, or what it tells us about
our respective cultures.
What is mildly more interesting about Mr. Madden’s movie as
compared to Mr. Curtis’s is the extent to which its theme of
culture clash between contemporary Britain and India is at odds
with and renders even more incoherent than it would otherwise be
the theme of self-realization and self-fulfillment through sex.
Both men would presumably call this self-fulfillment “love,” but it
signally lacks love’s unselfishness and desire for permanence, its
resolution and its well-known downside, which is what makes
resolution necessary to the hope of permanence. Mr. Madden’s tale
of seven elderly English folk seeking a cheap retirement community
and, as some of them are more aware than others, sexual hook-ups in
Jaipur, India, thus reduces love among these old people to what it
mostly is for young ones: namely, sexual attraction and response.
The only married couple in the bunch can find their fulfillment
only by splitting up.
Of course, the movie could never have been made if not for the
fact that this is more or less what love means to many more people
today than Richard Curtis or John Madden, but it is helpful to have
the idea put forth so crassly once in a while. It provides a mirror
in which we can see ourselves, though we may find that we don’t
much like what we see — namely, the trivialization of sexual
relationships, which is the inevitable consequence of treating a
means to an end as the end in itself, and ourselves as worshipers
of the now, engaged in an inevitably futile attempt to abolish
time. For that is the subtext of the film. The promise of India for
these seventy-somethings is the promise of a chance to do away with
the promises, implicit and explicit, of their earlier adult lives,
along with the rest of those lives, and to start again as
twenty-somethings.
There is a natural contrast with a still comparatively
tradition- (and therefore time-)bound India, but the film has
almost no interest in it. Mr. Madden’s Indians are a
grotesque and sentimental caricature. There are of course hints
here and there that they have a rather different view of love and
sex from that of the Europeans. Graham (Tom Wilkinson), the high
court judge who is the homosexual member of the party, has lived a
lifetime of regret after his youthful affair with an Indian friend
resulted in the latter’s disgrace. Sonny, the principal Indian
character and entrepreneurial proprietor of the eponymous hotel,
played by Dev Patel of Slumdog
Millionaire, is also in love with (and sleeping
with) Sunaina (Tena Desae) in defiance of an arranged marriage to
someone else as planned by his domineering mother (Lillete Dubey).
But these outdated notions are no match for the more enlightened
views now typical in the land of India’s former imperial masters.
Likewise, Graham, who is at last reunited with his long-ago
inamorato, gets a tender embrace from him as his wife (another
arranged marriage) looks on approvingly, before conveniently
dropping dead.
It would be tedious to go over the other characters’ quest for
personal fulfillment, though that of one of them (Maggie Smith)
does not involve the epiphanic bliss of what the Brits call legover
action — perhaps because her motivation in going to India is to
get a cheap hip replacement — and that of another (Judi Dench)
does so only incidentally and by implication. More interesting is
Sonny’s entrepreneurial dream of business success by finding a way
“to outsource old age,” though from his point of view it would more
accurately be called insourcing. Anyway, what it amounts to is
uprooting these old folks from their families and communities, none
of which seem to matter very much to any of them, or to exert any
countervailing pull on them to lessen the sexual one, and putting
them instead on what amounts to a permanent singles cruise. It
turns out to be an easy sell.
Interestingly, the idea of a permanent cruise as a solution to
the social and economic problem of our ever-increasing numbers of
useless oldies is also a feature of Albert Brooks’s novel
2030: The Real Story of What Happens to
America — a book whose “dystopian”
character perhaps gives a more accurate picture of what this would
actually be like in a world where the young have the strongest
interest in relieving themselves of the burden of the aged by
cutting them off from the more traditional harbors in which old age
and enfeeblement find refuge. Mr. Madden, like the cruise director,
obviously has an interest in persuading the oldsters that this
deracination means they are once again young and fancy-free in a
place where no one will care what they get up to with each other,
and there are a fair few who must be more than willing to be
persuaded. All the same, I doubt that Sonny’s business plan could
be a big success, though we may find that there are more takers for
the dream of geriatric sexual questing among movie-audiences, which
are mostly made up of young people.
